Charles Green’s win-win game
First, a disclaimer-stroke-apology: Wings Over Scotland isn’t a football blog. But as we’ve said before, in our opinion the fate of (The) Rangers FC will have a far greater influence on the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum than anything Johann Lamont will ever say or do in her life (something which certainly applies to her current pitiable carping about BSkyB), so we have to look at the bigger picture, and today that means talking about Rangers again.
It’s fair to say that Walter Smith’s intervention in the affair yesterday morning really put a tiger among the turtledoves. Rangers fans unsure about giving Charles Green their full backing – but ultimately likely to bite the bullet and go along with him for want of any alternative – had a new straw of hope, and wasted no time in clutching at it, as the influential Rangers Supporters Trust immediately asked fans not to buy season tickets unless Green stood aside to make way for Smith’s consortium.
The move places another obstacle in front of Green turning his newco Rangers into a viable business, to add to the many challenging ones he already faced – particularly hanging onto the playing and coaching staff (including manager Ally McCoist, whose departure would surely scupper any chance of supporters getting behind Green) and successfully negotiating entry into the SPL. But unlike most of the media, which is this morning reporting the Smith group’s succession as all but inevitable, we’re not sure Green will be all that concerned.
By far the dodgiest aspect of the entire administration-and-liquidation fiasco, yet the one that’s been by far the least addressed in the press, is the lightning-quick sale of the old club’s assets to Green at the knockdown price of £5.5m. Nobody has yet come up with a convincing explanation as to how Duff & Phelps could have been allowed to offload the stadium, training complex, car park and whichever players don’t exercise their get-out-of-contract-free options for such a small fraction of their apparent value without anyone else even being allowed to make an offer.
Indeed, as it’s the statutory duty of both the administrators and liquidators to maximise the return for creditors in the event that the business can’t be saved as a going concern, it’s completely bewildering that anyone could be allowed to put in place a deal in advance of a CVA proposal which effectively guaranteed that creditors would receive nothing if the CVA failed – in other words, giving the party proposing the CVA a vested interest in its failure.
We’re not lawyers or insolvency practitioners, so we don’t pretend to understand why a liquidator can be allowed to sell a bankrupt business’s assets for £5.5m when there’s already an alternative offer of £6m on the table – let alone any others than might come in if the assets were formally put up for public sale – so we’ll leave that to others to uncover if they can. Instead, we’re going to look at why, having succeeded in this apparent daylight robbery, Charles Green can’t lose no matter what happens next.
This blog estimates the chances of there being a Rangers team playing in Scottish professional football next year at about 50/50. The new club needs to be accepted into either the SPL – which we’re finding harder to picture as time goes on – or the SFL, which also means it has to survive the judgement of the Appellate Tribunal in respect of the disrepute charge still hanging over the old Rangers.
(Why does that matter, when the old Rangers is effectively dead anyway? Because if the old Rangers is suspended or expelled from the SFA, then it has no SPL share to transfer to the newco, because you can’t be in the SPL – or the SFL – if you’re not an SFA member. It would also lose its somewhat anomalous vote on any possible new application to join the SPL, which would significantly reduce the chances of the application being accepted.)
But either way, Charles Green is sitting pretty. If his Rangers are playing in one or other league come August, happy days. He’ll have a broadly viable business on his hands, albeit one that’s going to have quite a difficult job breaking even in the short term. (In particular the three years before Rangers are eligible for European competition.) But Green isn’t really interested in breaking even – he’s never made any bones about the fact that he doesn’t want to own Rangers a year from now. He’s in this for a quick profit, and a revived football-playing Rangers is merely the easiest route to achieving that, not the only one.
A working football club gives him an attractive asset to sell to potential purchasers like Smith’s group, and he can charge a hefty premium for it, knowing that it’s worth more to them because they’ll have the full backing of the support. (And that with the likes of Jim McColl aboard, they can afford to pay.) Green is already talking of demanding £20m to sell the club to anyone else, which would represent a very nice return indeed for a couple of months’ work.
But what if this plan doesn’t work out? What if the SFA give Rangers the bum’s rush, or the SPL/SFL both reject their application for membership in the name of sporting integrity (stop sniggering at the back), or the fans refuse to turn up and leave the club a financial basket case, or Smith’s group call his bluff and refuse to pay his price?
The answer is that Charles Green still wins. He has a debt-free business with a valuable real-estate portfolio, (and perhaps also a number of players who are still worth something in transfer fees). He can simply shut it down any time he likes, legitimately citing economic unviability, and it’s frankly impossible to see any halfway-competent businessman being unable to realise considerably more than £10m from the assets of The Rangers Football Club even in a fire sale.
The main stand at Ibrox is listed, but that was no obstacle to the redevelopment of Arsenal’s old stadium at Highbury – architects are highly adept these days at building new projects around old facades. Property values in the area, currently low, would undoubtedly rise if prospective residents weren’t going to have to deal with 50,000 Rangers fans on their doorstep every other week.
The ground and the Murray Park training complex both have planning restrictions on what they can be used for, but the authorities would have little option other than to withdraw them if the football club was dead anyway and someone was offering to build, say, a massive Tesco at either site, providing a huge boost and lots of jobs to a severely depressed local economy. It would be easy to make a pretty convincing argument that redeveloping Ibrox as housing (especially if some of it was social/affordable housing) would represent a massive and much-needed investment in regeneration for Govan, providing years of employment in construction alone.
Charles Green’s purchase of Rangers for £5.5m is a steal. It remains to be seen if that turns out to be literally true in a legal sense, but until such times as that happens, he’s already pulled off the difficult part of his plan. From here in, no matter what, for Sevco 5088 it’s profit all the way.
I’d love it if Ibrox got turned into flats.
What better way to finally get Aberdeen fans onside than for Stewarty Milne to buy Ibrox and turn it into flats, complete with the shoddy workmanship one comes to expect from his developments? Then he wouldn’t need to bother trying to build flats on Pittodrie. I can’t believe the man has never thought about doing this. He could even call them The Neil Simpson Apartments.
Or there must be some rich Celtic fan out there who has the money to make every Celtic fan’s dream come true?
Much as I enjoy the articles I need to raise my hand and say that the link to independence of the Rangers situations is pretty tenuous, in fact it doesn’t exist.
If it did the Unionists would be blaming the SNP for it and vice versa and you know it ….
Come on Stu just admit it, as a Dons fan you can’t help yourself being caught up in Rangers. Its OK I understand the attraction myself.
” He could even call them The Neil Simpson Apartments.”
“If it did the Unionists would be blaming the SNP for it and vice versa and you know it ….”
Rangers fans have flown several banners attacking the SNP. And I’ve had a number of angry Twitter users (is there any other kind?) furious about Salmond’s “interference” supposedly antagonising HMRC into rejecting the CVA. Of course, all the standard disclaimers about generalisations apply, but it seems to me to be epically daft to dispute that the MAJORITY – and a pretty big majority at that – of Rangers fans are Unionists. The clue’s in the flags.
Seriously though, you keep bringing up this bloody Highbury thing and using it as an example. Have you ever actually walked round that area, Govan is not North London and never will be. . They are in the process of knocking down some high rise buildings and there is plenty of other brown field areas lying scabby and vacant.
So no shortage of land locally, unpopular area, poor amenites, not the best neighbourhood, if you can get 10M from that I have some money you could invest for me.
If you think the good residents of Milngavie will allow the change of use of the Rangers training ground without a major revolt then I think again its wishful thinking.
It could impact their house prices plus at least one side of the fan divide will be very anti……not sure who though.
“Seriously though, you keep bringing up this bloody Highbury thing and using it as an example. Have you ever actually walked round that area, Govan is not North London and never will be. . They are in the process of knocking down some high rise buildings and there is plenty of other brown field areas lying scabby and vacant.
So no shortage of land locally, unpopular area, poor amenites, not the best neighbourhood,”
As I’ve noted in the piece, though – how much of that is due, with honestly no offence intended, to the fact that anyone moving into the area knows there are going to be 50,000 Rangers fans swarming through the streets every other weekend? Investment, by the simple fact of existing at all, automatically boosts the economy of any neighbourhood. Govan would benefit massively simply from the construction work involved in building a prestige project, and the better-off somewhere is the more people want to live there. But more importantly, developers would become more interested in the area in general if it didn’t have a big ugly football club slap bang in the middle of it.
The clue may be in the flags to you but as I’ve explained to you at least twice before at length the flags don’t get a vote and how you personally view a flag be it Saltire or UJ doesn’t automatically mean its how everyone else does. Where are all those Tories in Glasgow then ?
“how you personally view a flag be it Saltire or UJ doesn’t automatically mean its how everyone else does. Where are all those Tories in Glasgow then?”
That last bit doesn’t actually make any sense – it’s mixing up correlation and causation. But I think it’s reasonably fair to say that people waving a Union Jack tend to be quite fond of the Union.
For what it’s worth, IMHO, this whole Green shenanigans stinks!
I can not look at this Green takeover of Rangers, in whatever form it ends up, as nothing more than Whyte Mk II!
3 potential options for Ibrox:
• The Scottish Government could snap it up, donate a couple of snooker tables, and turn it into a community centre. The orange vote in 2014 would be pretty much assured after this heartwarming act of generosity.
• Stick a windfarm on it. Paint it red, white and blue. Everyone’s happy.
• The John MacKay Rangers Holocaust Museum.
Got to agree with the Rev here – the vast majority of rabid Rangers fans I’ve seen on Twitter have been unionists as well. Search for people using abusive language about the SNP, and nine times out of ten they’ll have a union jack in their avatar and their bio will mention the UK and Rangers.
That’s not to say all Rangers fans are unionist – I know ones that are very much pro-independence – but they’re only the ones who have the intelligence to know that just because their club stands behind the union jack, it doesn’t mean they have to swear allegiance to the UK state. For the rest, Rangers and the UK are parts of their identity, and I suspect they think independence threatens that. If the Rangers part is removed beforehand, there’s less reason for them to remain so doggedly loyal to the union.
Plenty of nutters linked to and who attend Ibrox, the club itself is in my opinion too political and should keep its beak out. The casual assumption from other fans who’s experience and knowledge is limited to being on the opposite terracing that they are all or in the majority anti Scottish/anti independence is wrong. If Rangers fans were true to their colours they would all be voting Tory.
A good first move would be dump the Ulster fans, too much baggage there and their reasons for support are wrong. Independence might help that situation within a single generation.
You might think its a fair assumption but I would say its wrong. The links to Ulster Unionism and historic anti Irish/anti Immigration viewpoints have a greater historic influence on Rangers than the questions of Home Rule for Scotland.
The one party that absolutely wraps itself up in the UJ is the Tories, how does it not make sense….
You are framing your whole argument on the political situation today, Rangers have been around for over 100 years….
how much of that is due, with honestly no offence intended, to the fact that anyone moving into the area knows there are going to be 50,000 Rangers fans swarming through the streets every other weekend?
That factor is difficult to judge as overall Govan isn’t a great area with fantastic amenities. its an area that has been dominated to a high degree by industrialisation and the M8 cut’s it in 2.
Certainly the bi weekly influx of fans is damaging, it also brings an almost carnivalistic or temporary element into the retail/business opportunities.
I just think the housing stock locally is too dominated by flats to be able to pull it up with just one development, as I said previously its not London where land is at a huge premium and any space is pounced on.
Regardless of all that there is little or no chance of major housing investment in the short-medium term based on external economic outlook. Unless of course Simmie fancies getting his name in lights…..
If you were a Euromillions winner of the opposite persuasion you would be tempted though, I know I would if it were Celtic or the Dons….Its not likely that after a £120M win that I’d to be moving back from the Cote D’Azure or Mauritius to Glasgow/Aberdeen anyway, so like Whyte I wouldn’t be worried about any backlash.
What I do find bizarre is that Green bought the club for almost the same as what Murray originally paid for it
The more this tale twists and turns the more I think that someone with a long view and time to take it is working away in the background and just building up a position for later harvest.
That someone could well be HMRC.
They could quite easily be laying a trap in order to catch, Murray, Whyte, Duff and Phillips and maybe geta few suckers from the Engish Premier League to settle very quickly.
Can’t make too much about this, but it is in the end a matter of public record. A disposition on behalf of RFC – IFO – Green was submitted today at ROS. Disposition was an implementation of agreement, no consideration being paid. For fee-ing purposes Ibrox and Murray Park training ground were valued at £500k & £1million respectively.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/britan-fights-euro-zone-threat-100-billion-pound-012322645–business.html
There you go £100BN worth of loans for development waiting to be snapped up….just think of those numbers for a minute.
I’m not sure I get the relevance.
I read a comment on Alex Thomson’s Ch4 blog that BDO had the power to look into and oveturn the sale. I await feedback from liqudation practicioners.
See here, Auldheid:
link to wingsland.podgamer.com
And in tonights episode, Walter withdraws his 6m offer.
Next week, Ally joins the Salvation Army.
Indeed. It’s getting hard to see how Green can get away from this any other way than a fire-sale of assets now. An ongoing club is just going to be a money-pit.
Not that I’m interested, but I heard someone on the radio yesterday remark that Rangers couldn’t be a money-making concern for anyone but an asset-stripper.